Cindy Cohn

Cindy Cohn

Executive Director

Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. Ms. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography.

In 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn." She was also named in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online." In 2007 the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.

Issues that Ms. Cohn currently handles

NSA Spying: Ms Cohn serves as counsel in Jewel v. NSA, and First Unitarian Church v. NSA, each seeking to stop the ongoing dragnet warrantless surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. Ms. Cohn also served as coordinating counsel for over forty national class action lawsuits against the telecommunications carriers and the government seeking to stop the warrantless surveillance. EFF filed the first such case, Hepting v. AT&T, in 2006 against telecom giant AT&T for violating its customers' privacy. Ms. Cohn is considered one of the experts in the legal issues arising from the secretivegovernment spying programs work. For example, she contributed an article to the Yale Law Journal on "Protecting the Fourth Amendment in theInformation Age."

In re National Security Letter: EFF represents service providers who have brought challenges the National Security Letter statute, which was dramatically expanded as part of the USA Patriot Act, including placing broad and permanent gag orders on providers. EFF previously represented the Internet Archive in a similar challenge in 2007, which was ended after the government withdrew the request and lifted the gag order.

CFAA Reform: Ms. Cohn works to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in light of the tragic death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

Platform censorship: EFF advocates for clear, strong protections for intermediaries as well as fair, transparent moderation practices. Highly prohibitive platform moderation practices often have a disproportionate silencing effect on marginalized communities. Ms. Cohn has spoken out against platform censorship in news outlets like PBS Newshour, CNN, Fortune, Salon, Mashable, and in the the Georgetown Law Review.

Ms. Cohn is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. She did her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. For 10 years prior to joining the EFF, she was a civil litigator in private practice handling technology- related cases. Before starting private practice, she worked for a year at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Ms. Cohn also served as counsel to the plaintiffs in Bowoto v. Chevron, two lawsuits in San Francisco arising from Chevron's involvement in human rights abuses against environmental protesters in Nigeria. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Tor Project.

Past issues

California Reader Privacy Act: Ms. Cohn and EFF co-sponsored this law, passed in 2011, that requires a court order for law enforcement to access reading records held by booksellers selling to California residents.

Google Book Search and Privacy: Ms. Cohn represented a coalition of authors and publishers—including best-sellers Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and technical author Bruce Schneier—in urging a federal judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search, arguing that the sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy rights for readers and writers.

Electronic Voting: Ms. Cohn Coordinated national litigation strategy for electronic voting machines and assisted technologists and others who are concerned about the security and accountability of those. EFF's projects included assisting grassroots activists nationwide in considering and bringing legal challenges to insecure voting machines,filing amicus briefs in support of activists nationwide, including in litigation in Maryland, California, Texas, Ohio and New Jersey, assisting members of IEEE working groups, advising those engaged in the political and legal discussions on those issues, advising technologists who wished to do research in this area.

Anonymity or John Doe cases: Ms. Cohn has represented anonymous speakers in a variety of cases, including bringing In Re 2TheMart.com, which helped established core legal standards for protecting the identity of online speakers sought by civil subpoena.

Misuse of Copyright Infringement notices (DMCA 512(f)): Ms. Cohn argued the OPG v. Diebold case where e-voting machine manufacturer Diebold was held liable for sending out unfounded cease and desist notices to ISPs in an effort to stop public discussion of the flaws in its electronic voting machines evidenced in a published internal e-mail archive.

Deeplinks Posts by Cindy

Throughout our long history of defending encryption, EFF has taken a special interest in ensuring that researchers and programmers who help build and strengthen digital security are not prevented from sharing their knowledge. Because of this history, we periodically get requests about the status of U.S. export controls and how...

Last week, news broke of a large financial settlement for the massive 2017 Equifax data breach affecting 147 million Americans. While the direct compensation to those harmed and the fines paid are important, it’s equally important to evaluate how much this result is likely to create strong incentives to...

The recent arrest of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange surprised many by hinging on one charge: a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) charge for a single, unsuccessful attempt to reverse engineer a password. This might not be the only charge Assange ultimately faces. The government can add more...

The U.S. government admits—and, of course, it’s common knowledge—that the NSA conducts mass, dragnet surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans’ communications. It has done so via a series of different technical strategies and legal arguments for over 18 years. Yet the Justice Department insists that our legal fight against...

While the indictment of Julian Assange centers on an alleged attempt to break a password—an attempt that was not apparently successful—it is still, at root, an attack on the publication of leaked material and the most recent act in an almost decade-long effort to punish a whistleblower and the...

When a president threatens to exercise the power to declare a national emergency, our system of checks and balances faces a crucial test. With President Trump threatening such a declaration in order to build his proposed physical border wall, that test could be an important one that could quickly implicate...

EFF is in it for the long run, especially in the important, hard fights for your rights. One of the longest running fights in online civil liberties is over your right to have a private conversation over a digital network. Whether it’s for our intimate relationships, our healthcare, our associations...

As 2018 draws to a close, we’ve gathered together some of EFF’s key legal wins this year. Some of these wins are only stops along the way to a larger goal, but each is hard fought, whether we’re serving as counsel or amicus curiae. Every one of these victories helped...

Your rights go with you when you go online. That’s the simple premise that has guided EFF’s work for 28 years. To make this premise real in 2018, we worked to ensure that law, corporate policies, and software are all hard-coded with the principles of free speech, privacy, and the...